Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion

[JayJuanGee]

I am not sure, exactly what you mean, but I am NOT completely out of the loop that some attacks on bitcoin could come from within and about differing opinions that will end up causing the market to choose - while at the same time could well have a decent amount of division - and not just normies.. so if there is a battle, there can be pissed of people on both sides who vary in their technical expertise and their OG status or whatever (assuming that there might only be two sides when there could end up being more than two sides to make matters even more confusing)... I am not going to act like that those scenarios might not develop in bitcoin, but at the same time, I am not going to let my speculation about such scenarios to stop me from continuing to invest in bitcoin.. and to wait and see in some regards.. and even continue to recommend that others better fucking get a stake in bitcoin.. sooner rather than waiting around.,. hahahahaha

Simply put, if some large segment of the network became disconnected (probably China) each side of the split would continue building on whichever piece of the fork was closest to it, adding new transactions, confirming new blocks. This happens regularly for a block or two but if the split was protracted, many blocks could be "confirmed". When the net rejoins, the fork with the least hashrate gets evaporated and all the transactions undone. Some (most) of those transactions will get incorporated later in the winning chain but if it happens (less likely every year but who knows with what's going on), it could be the kind of thing that top English scientists would describe as a "brouhaha"

Indeed, I believe there was some fuss a little while back and that was only two-or-three blocks.

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-double-spend-that-never-happened

Jeez, that was just one block.

Your scenario is much more of a creature of accident - rather than the one that I described, surely even seems to be quite speculative - and not something that we would get worked up about - even though it could happen and surely would affect those with transactions during that period whether it is 3-10 blocks or even quite higher numbers of blocks (such as 100 blocks) to make matters even more challenging in terms of whether any recourse would come to those on the shorter chain.. or however it should be described or potentially resolved.

I think that in then end, even though those are good technical and developer topics, they really do not seem to be too helpful to discuss in threads like this because they seem to be focusing on pie in the sky scenarios that had about a snow balls chance in hell of happening, so we should not be giving them any more emphasis than that.  

I recall on a regular basis between 2014 and maybe into 2017, dicktwat Jorge Stolfi ongoingly focusing on such theoretically feasible pie in the sky nonsense topics for seemingly years in this thread, and his ongoing theoretical speculations about negative matters that might happen did not tend to be very helpful in terms of understanding more important and more likely scenarios... such as number goes up while he was presenting 1001 ways that bitcoin would die and number would go down (but did not happen in any way even close to his ongoing speculation and attention to such nonsense - even though sometimes theoretically possible).

[Millionero]

Once Biden is gone I do not think the right wants Harris as the prez.

If Biden dies and we get a colored lady in the White House, it will be fun watching rube-publican heads explode.

[Arriemoller]

The L1/L2 distinction is not only a Bitcoin thing; it addresses problems which are fundamental to blockchain architectures.  As the market matures, developers and users will come better to recognize which transactions belong on a blockchain, and which don’t.  A beneficial side effect of Bitcoin’s scaling debates is that Bitcoin is years ahead of any altcoin in L2 developments.  (Notwithstanding how Ethereum has been spinning its wheels with L2 talk; it has much worse scaling problems than Bitcoin, and thus far much less to show in terms of solutions.)

The problem is that Bitcoin itself is not adequate to support the L2 systems being constructed for it. (Something explicitly acknowledged by the LN developers by the way). The problem is not that Bitcoin is inadequate to the purposes to which I would like to see it put (which might have fallen by the wayside, admitedly) but also to those you are suggesting for it.

I'm not going to argue for bigger blocks right now though. I think the need is going to become ever more self evident. Indeed, the recent hashrate crash would have been largely a non-even if there was adequate capacity.

"I'm not going to argue for bigger blocks right now though" argues for bigger blocks.

Stop your bcash shilling!!!

[Arriemoller]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

If I personally had to chose, I would rather live in a MacArthur society that nips all socialism in the bud, then in the type of society the USA, and many other countries, is turning into now.
I would be fine with outlawing communism and radical socialism.

[Richy_T]

I think that in then end, even though those are good technical and developer topics, they really do not seem to be too helpful to discuss in threads like this because they seem to be focusing on pie in the sky scenarios that had about a snow balls chance in hell of happening, so we should not be giving them any more emphasis than that.  

That's probably fair.

[ErisDiscordia]

The application of this for Bitcoin could be to code your wallet seed phrase in this way by choosing a book and finding those seed words in the book and converting them to 5 digit numbers.

Without knowing from which book and the exact print edition (your key), your seed phrase is reasonably safe.

The cryptographers here will be able to punch holes in this but for good enough protection for regular folk it could work quite well.

Yes, they will.  So don’t do it.

*snipped brainwallet talk*

Using phrases from books as your seed phrase seems obviously insecure. Even if you use a further encryption method of your own design.

What about passphrases, though? Let's say you have your seed properly generated & stored in a secure manner. How much additional security would a six word phrase from a book provide? What about six words, picked from one book, using a method of your own design? How would the entropy generated this way compare with the entropy of six randomly generated words (such as throwing dice & picking words from the diceware list)?

Random six word passphrases are generally recommended as secure enough. Their downside is that while they are much easier to remember than secure strings of alphanumberic + symbols, they are still hard to remember, especially if you use more than a few. When using a method to generate 6 words from books, you just have to remember the method and which books you used. Is it comparably secure to storing your passphrases in a password manager or on paper in a hidden location?

This way, your wallet has 3 layers of protection: your seed phrase, your passphrase generation method and the knowledge of which particular print of a book to use. At this point I believe your biggest risk of loss is clearly yourself & the multiple points of failure you have set up

[modrobert]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

McCarthyism is clearly one of the problems, but I think it is more than that. Constant propaganda from the biggest mainstream media outlets dating back to the Vietnam war (perhaps further back), which makes it almost impossible to discuss as people tend to trust what they learned from mainstream media over the past decades.

How are these media lies created? A starting point...

Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1tfkESPVY

CIA Officer Frank Snepp Discusses Planting Stories in Vietnam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwerBZG83YM

These agents both went through CIA lawsuits after telling the truth, more info on that in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stockwell_(CIA_officer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Snepp


I think a healthy approach is to distrust all news sources to some degree, and build from that. Triangulation of media outlets; pick at least three with different views (not just mainstream, use independent media as well) in an attempt to get closer to the amoral truth. Perhaps this goes without saying, as traders in WO it's best to stay well-informed, dig really deep even when it upsets your previous dispositions.

If mainstream media is all you have consumed in the past it is high time to re-evaluate what you know about Bitcoin, the Fed, wars, socialism, Cuba, Russia, etc.

[DaRude]

Do you have a citation for that?

https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of
micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels
per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require
133 MB blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 blocks per
year). Current generation desktop computers will be able to run a full node
with old blocks pruned out on 2TB of storage.

...

To me this sounds like we're already just 133x away or two orders of magnitude from covering whole world wide population. So at current stage should be enough capacity to meet current needs with LN. How do other blockchains (lol) compare in regards to being able to cover whole human population, say 100 transaction/human/day?

[Richy_T]

Do you have a citation for that?

https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of
micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels
per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require
133 MB blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 blocks per
year). Current generation desktop computers will be able to run a full node
with old blocks pruned out on 2TB of storage.

...

To me this sounds like we're already just 133x away or two orders of magnitude from covering whole world wide population. So at current stage should be enough capacity to meet current needs with LN. How do other blockchains (lol) compare in regards to being able to cover whole human population?

I'll just bold up a couple of parts of that myself. Again, take a gander at how LN works and see if you think only two channels will be sufficient unless massive centralization occurs.

[Phil_S]

Solution:  Don’t run executable code from unknown sources.

The .exe might be perfectly fine, from a known source. Yet malicious payload might be hiding in .dll

Freshly downloaded .dll from a compomised update (supply chain attack).

According to your logic, these 29,000 users did nothing wrong:

As many as 29,000 users of the Passwordstate password manager downloaded a malicious update that extracted data from the app and sent it to an attacker-controlled server. Bad actors compromised its upgrade mechanism and used it to install a malicious file on user computers.

They trusted the software and its update mechanism.

[ErisDiscordia]

I think a healthy approach is to distrust all news sources to some degree, and build from that. Triangulation of media outlets; pick at least three with different views (not just mainstream, use independent media as well) in an attempt to get closer to the amoral truth. Perhaps this goes without saying, as traders in WO it's best to stay well-informed, dig really deep even when it upsets your previous dispositions.

If mainstream media is all you have consumed in the past it is high time to re-evaluate what you know about Bitcoin, the Fed, wars, socialism, Cuba, Russia, etc.

I remember how naively happy I was when alternative media online became a thing and people started to question the Status Quo more often. Turns out, most of them are happy enough to leave it at that, pat themselves on the shoulder for being smarter than the sheeple and promptly proceed to blindly start following whichever alternative media source happens to denounce the Status Quo (all of them) and confirm their biases. Some of them even parade on online forums, posing as "independent thinkers" who have "done their research" 

Question all authority.

[DaRude]

Do you have a citation for that?

https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of
micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels
per year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require
133 MB blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 blocks per
year). Current generation desktop computers will be able to run a full node
with old blocks pruned out on 2TB of storage.

...

To me this sounds like we're already just 133x away or two orders of magnitude from covering whole world wide population. So at current stage should be enough capacity to meet current needs with LN. How do other blockchains (lol) compare in regards to being able to cover whole human population?

I'll just bold up a couple of parts of that myself. Again, take a gander at how LN works and see if you think only two channels will be sufficient unless massive centralization occurs.

I highlighted a part too. Once the routing issues are solved, channel re balancing improves, and there are millions of interconnected LN nodes globally, i'd say 6-8/lifetime for a typical user should suffice. Naturally lowest skilled population would probably centralize to their local village node anyway, then a good chunk will use single Facebook/Venmo/Paypal/CashApp/Google/Amazon/regional tech giant channel just because big techs are giving them free stickers/smileys for selling their privacy. Repressive nations will end up tying their CBDCs into LN but will prohibit their population from using LN directly, majority will probably oblige. The point is not to force everyone on earth to buy their coffee on blockchain, but to give them an option, an alternative to current system if they wish to use it. Those who wish can open their own channel to nodes in US, Europe, Russia, South America, China, Europe and Africa and they'd already be exponentially more diversified than currently with all transaction going through either the mastercard or visa networks

[shahzadafzal]

Solution:  Don’t run executable code from unknown sources.

The .exe might be perfectly fine, from a known source. Yet malicious payload might be hiding in .dll

Freshly downloaded .dll from a compomised update (supply chain attack).

According to your logic, these 29,000 users did nothing wrong:

As many as 29,000 users of the Passwordstate password manager downloaded a malicious update that extracted data from the app and sent it to an attacker-controlled server. Bad actors compromised its upgrade mechanism and used it to install a malicious file on user computers.

They trusted the software and its update mechanism.

Don’t run executable code.  only if they ask me first :p

Yes it's not limited to executable code any more, code injection from the know sources are the real threat these days for example these software updates are the real time code injection examples. If we are talking about hacking this would be no.1 cause and i would place backdoors and zero day vulnerabilities in same category of code injection.

[BitcoinBunny]

"Biden to sell historic spending plans in speech to Congress"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56910884

I'm confused with the reporting here, is it $6 trillion or $7.5 trillion in total?

Eye watering figures.  


I was just trying to imagine how much a trillion dollars actually is. This video helped.
I thought for a minute, no it's not the last one, it's the one a few steps back. But no, it IS the last one. And that is only ONE trillion dollars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKrFFFpYgkU&ab_channel=AnimatedStuff

It took 10 years of interest from techies, traders, those interested in finance and now normies to invest savings and time for Bitcoin to reach that total marketcap figure.
Biden throws it around like it's nothing.

[nullius]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

McCarthy was right, you historically ignorant boob.  Though I guess you don’t know that if your sources of education are Hollywood, the mass media, the public schools, the the Communist Encyclopaedia to which you link-drop in lieu of a rational argument.

Much though he has been maligned and smeared (and as incompetently as he fouled up parts of the handling of his own investigation—which is how he got knocked down), McCarthy was right, and more right than he knew.  There was significant high-level Communist infiltration of the United States Federal government^*—so much, and at such a high level, that a mere Senator was in way over his head.

Stop traducing one of the only good Senators that the United States has had within the past century.

* At this juncture, I am often bemused by some Internet idiot conflating Senator McCarthy’s investigation of infiltration of the USG with the House Unamerican Activities Committee’s investigation of Hollywood.  Those Hollywood Commies have really done a bang-up job miseducating the public.

[Phil_S]

$6 trillion is about 240 NASA budgets.

[Karartma1]

Boring sideways.
Give me some action!

[marcus_of_augustus]

"Biden to sell historic spending plans in speech to Congress"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56910884

I'm confused with the reporting here, is it $6 trillion or $7.5 trillion in total?

Biden throws it around like it's nothing.

... it is precisely, nothing.

Printed up out of thin air with a Ctrl-P, or something similar as database entries at the Federal Reserve ... it's nothing, zilch, fugazee. Throw it around.

[somac.]

Boring sideways.
Give me some up action!

ftfy

[El duderino_]

https://twitter.com/spinte8/status/1387167093972422663?s=21